


A Reckoning

by Sanguinity (DirectorShellhead)



Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Gen, Mild Gore, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-12
Updated: 2012-07-12
Packaged: 2017-11-09 20:35:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/458108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DirectorShellhead/pseuds/Sanguinity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In <i>Merrick</i>, a final cleansing of New Orleans is mentioned in which all rogue vampires are eradicated. This is the story of that cleansing from a different point of view.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Reckoning

**Author's Note:**

> Possible spoiler alert for the following Chronicles: Memnoch the Devil, Merrick, The Vampire Armand

Warehouse district, just off Airline Highway. Sirens shrieked in the distance, bouncing back onto themselves off row after row of nondescript metal-sided storehouses. A jet roared overhead, and a hundred minds threw a thousand jostling thoughts uninvited into my consciousness. I shook my head.

The building was burning. Cement crackled hot beneath the soles of my boots. Smoke filled my lungs, thick and acrid, swirling red, then black, then red again with the lights of the fire engines as they circled below.

Armand was perched like a gargoyle at the roof's ledge, expressionless and unmoving, merely watching me. I wanted to ask him how we'd gotten here, but it seemed a shame to disrupt the crashing finality of whatever had just come to an end.

I'd been the catalyst. I knew that much, and wondered at my own failed pride.

And I knew, though I hadn't looked down, that I was covered in blood. Intrinsically I knew that if I flexed my fingers I would feel it, caked thick, pull tight across my knuckles as it dried. It made the fabric of my shirt slick and clammy against my chest. I didn't move.

I knew, too, that it wasn't mine; I could feel it raging stolen and relentless through my veins, until my very frame seemed to hum in some sick victorious rhythm to its insidious foreign hymn.

A question hung in the miasma between us, and Armand seemed poised perfectly but only to deflect it.

"Tell me," I said. I thought it strange, the hollow sound of the words. Like someone else's.

"It is finished." His eyes flashed brilliant amber now. The flames were licking over the lip of the building's edge, throwing shadows that made him seem to undulate and grow large, though I knew he was perfectly still.

I shut my eyes.

When it had begun--this slaughter, this final cleansing of the city--I couldn't say. Time had become a slippery thing, disjointed and threatening, and I had been roused from the groundless tumbling darkness, but I could not hold the rolling moments firmly in place. Jumbled and indistinct, they were tied together only by fire and violence.

Pale faces crumpling with agony flitted across the crushed palate of memory, as I watched marble-hard bodies wither into ash. I had listened in stony silence as soundless preternatural voices spun sibilant into the ether, screaming out their failed and pitiful coups de grace. I had known ruthlessness; I'd let it serve as the icy fuel to drive me after them, when will and reason seemed ideals only dreamed of once upon a time. I had cut them down with such effortlessness, such cursory indifference, that I suspected it at times to have been only another in a host of hazy fantasies.

This was not my reality. Only everyone else's, and it was for them that this massacre had come to pass.

For me, it had been a fleeting respite.

I had no time.

Only when a cool hand pressed into the flesh of my shoulder did I feel myself shaking, and my eyes snapped wide to see Armand's locked to them, too close and always too large. Funny angle, this. He was leaning down to look at me. I felt the blistering grit beneath my palms. I was on my knees.

What have I done?

He shook his head once, no. "Come with me."

"I can't."

"You will. We must go now."

Deep groaning wail, now, as the thick steel beams supporting the flat cement of the roof began to buckle. He'd made a sound very like that, the old one, the shabby ringleader, as I'd plunged fingers through the sucking wet muscle of his back to crush his spine.

That had been my greeting of sorts. Weeks ago, or only hours, but I remembered it and that was something. I'd snatched him from the alley like some swooping bird of prey; he had cursed and writhed as he damned me into the pits of hell. I could picture the patterns the sputtering blood had made upon his chin before I'd leaned in, voracious, to kiss it away and spill more. My laughter had sounded fractured and shrill in my own ears.

It sounded no different now.

Armand wasn't smiling.


End file.
